


Shadows Of What Came Before

by WorryinglyInnocent



Series: Homeward Bound [8]
Category: Lost
Genre: AU, Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Gen, Oceanic Six Claire, season 4, season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 06:51:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14014599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorryinglyInnocent/pseuds/WorryinglyInnocent
Summary: Continuing theHomeward Boundseries, a canon divergence in which Claire left the island in the season four finale and became part of the Oceanic Six, raising Aaron herself.Ajira 316 returns to the island, and Claire finds herself wondering what purpose she serves here and why she has been summoned back as she discovers a memento from her first time on the island.





	Shadows Of What Came Before

Ajira flight 316 to Guam is due to begin boarding shortly. Claire sits on the uncomfortable seats in the departure lounge, hugging her knees to her chest and resting her forehead on them. The gate attendants look at her sympathetically, wondering if she’s a nervous flyer, or just tired due to the late hour of the flight. 

Claire is neither tired nor nervous. When she thinks about how she felt in the run up to the flight out to Los Angeles, in comparison all she can feel is numb. She had a call from an unknown number a few hours ago, Carole and Aaron’s voices telling her that they were ok and they’d see her soon. Carole had sounded nervous, but Aaron was his usual bouncy self, so whatever has happened to them, and wherever they are, at least her son is not scared. She’s only been apart from him for less than a day and Claire already misses him so much it’s a physical ache.

Over by the gate is Kate, sunglasses on and hair pulled back, feigning disinterest in the rest of the proceedings and pretending not to know anyone. Since she’s not allowed to leave the state, let alone the country, and she’s travelling under false documents, Claire knows better than to disabuse the rest of the onlookers from the notion that they’re strangers, although she would dearly love a friendly face right now. Sun is also there, also pretending to be a stranger, although she exchanged a smile with Claire when she first came to sit down. Claire closes her eyes and keeps her forehead pressed against her knees. Out of one ear she can hear Jack and Hurley talking at the gate desk. Jack’s having trouble with a coffin. Locke’s, she presumes. It seems that Jack is doomed to transporting corpses on planes for all eternity now.

“Claire?”

It’s Hurley’s voice, and his big and gentle hand on her shoulder. She didn’t think that he would come, and from the sound of it, no-one else thought he was going to either. She turns her head minutely to look at him.

“It’s going to be ok, Claire. I promise. Aaron and your mom are going to be all right and you’ll see them again soon.”

Claire wishes that she could share his optimism, but it’s too much for her right now. She gives a quick glance around the rest of the departure lounge, and her stomach turns itself in knots again as she realises just how she is the odd one out of all the Oceanic survivors who are sitting there.

It feels like she’s the only one who has everything to lose.

Jack and Kate don’t really have anything tying them down to Los Angeles. The only links they have are to each other. Jack has his profession, but he was the first to decide to go back to the island. Kate has nothing holding her here and she has always lived a transient lifestyle. Sun has Ji Yeon, but she’s also going to the island with a purpose, to find Jin, whom Ben is sure is still alive despite what their eyes might have told them when they saw the freighter explode. She thinks, bitterly, that Ben would probably know more than anyone what was happening on the island, since he basically ran the place.

Hurley’s the only one to whom she feels any kind of kinship at the moment, as he too is leaving his family behind and is not returning to the island with any kind of purpose in mind. Although, there again, something must have happened in the last twenty-four hours to change his mind, because the last she had heard, he’d turned himself in and was in jail awaiting transfer, very happily not returning to the island, and now he’s out here. Maybe he does have a higher purpose.

Claire has no purpose on the island. The only reason she is going back is to protect the things she’s leaving behind here in the outside world, knowing that in doing this to keep Aaron safe, she might never see him again. She’s run out of tears by now; she can’t cry no matter how much she wants to. Hurley rubs her back, soothing her, and she keeps her eyes closed until they open the gate and start getting everyone on the plane. The five of them are all seated randomly, nowhere near each other, and Claire wonders if that’s by chance or design. She thinks nothing of it. She can’t think of anything now except her mum and Aaron. As they sit waiting to take off, she flicks through all the photographs of Aaron on her camera, glad that she has these with her if nothing else. She has to get through this. She is going to get back to him no matter what it takes.

There’s a commotion as the gate is closing, and a moment later Ben rushes onto the plane. Someone gave him a beating in the interval since she saw him last, and a cold part of her thinks  _good_. She wants to deliver another one herself, but they’re about to take off and she can’t get out of her seat. A numbness has settled in her limbs and she doesn’t want to move, she doesn’t have the energy to expend on smacking Ben into a pulp just yet. She just settles for glaring at him, and she knows that if looks could kill, he’d be six feet under by now. Across the plane, Sun catches her eye and her murderous expression, and she shakes her head soberly.

_He’s not worth it,_  she mouths. Claire wonders if she agrees, and wonders if hurting him will make her feel better and heal the deep wounds in her own soul.

They leave Los Angeles behind, and Claire closes her eyes not out of any desire to sleep, but in the hope that when she opens them, she’ll be back in Sydney and all of this will have been a nightmare. Aaron will be in his room twelve steps down the hall from her. Her mother will be in her own house just around the corner. They’ll go to the park after breakfast and Aaron will laugh and plead with her to push him higher and higher on the swings, so high that he feels like he’s flying.

Flying.

The thought of flying brings her full circle, as the pilot’s voice brings her out of her doze and into cold, harsh reality again.

It’s Frank.

It’s all very real now. They’re definitely not going to Guam; what feeble little hope that she still had of it has been extinguished. In its place though, another hope has risen. Frank was the one to get them off the island last time. If anyone is going to do it again – provided he survives, of course – then it’s going to be Frank. Maybe all is not lost after all, but so much depends on the next few hours. Claire curls up under her blanket, ignoring the world around her and thinking about Aaron. She doesn’t intend to sleep, although she must have succumbed to exhaustion in the end because the next thing she knows, the plane is jolting all over the place, and she’s as awake as she’s ever been. Oh god, this is it, they’re all about to die. The people on the flight who haven’t been through this all before are screaming but Claire feels a deceptive calm inside.

Frank’s voice on the intercom tells them all to brace for impact and dutifully she puts her hands over her head between her knees. Head down, stay down. Her eyes are screwed tight shut but she can still see the searing flash of light through them, like a fork of lightning within the plane itself.

Then the plane comes down to earth with a horrific crash, and it continues to rumble along, sending trees flying in every direction – Claire can hear them cracking against the sides of the fuselage. Finally, finally, they come to a stop. A small part of her wants to applaud a moderately successful landing. At least the plane’s all in one piece this time. She thinks. Carefully looking up and around at the rest of the cabin, yes, it’s all in one piece. She gives a sigh of relief and glances over at Sun, who is looking similarly shaken and yet somewhat cautiously optimistic. The other passengers are calming down from their mass hysteria, with some laughing at the fact they actually survived and some shouting for medical help where people have been injured in the crash.

As Frank prepares to evacuate everybody off the plane, Claire slips out of her seat and crosses over to Sun before looking around for the rest of their little group.

Jack, Kate and Hurley, however, are nowhere to be seen.

“Where the hell did they go?” Claire whispers. Sun shrugs.

“I have no idea.”

X

Once more, things move very quickly and they all seem to blur together. The survivors of flight 316 begin to make do in the same way that the survivors of flight 815 did, but for Sun and Claire, who are doing this for the second time, there are more pressing matters to attend to. They need to find Jack, Kate, Hurley, Jin, all the other people who they left on the island. That’s the only reason that they came back here, after all. Frank sees them conspiring and agrees to come with them, and after they’ve knocked out Ben, something that Claire took great delight in doing, they set off paddling towards the main island.

From there, it’s all one long chain of revelations one after the other. In the derelict buildings on the shore line, they meet her father, or rather something else that wears her father’s face, because Claire knows that Christian Shepherd was dead before he ever set foot on this island.

She still has only vague memories of that night in the jungle, of following him almost in a trance and almost leaving Aaron behind. Most of the time, she can convince herself that it was all a dream, but deep down she knows better. They listen in disbelief as Christian tells them that the others, including Jin and Sayid whom they thought dead and Juliet, Sawyer and Miles whom they thought irretrievably lost are all in the seventies, on the island and existing in tandem with them but in a completely different time. There’s the photograph as proof, but Claire still can’t quite accept the truth that’s staring her in the face. Locke had told her that the island had been travelling through time and she had believed him then, but why did Jack, Hurley and Kate get pulled out of the plane and into the seventies, but she and Sun remained where they were?

“They all have parts to play there,” Christian says enigmatically. “They had to go back, because they were always there. Everything that happened, happened, and so they had to be there to make it happen. But you and Sun were never in the past, so you weren’t taken there.”

It makes sense to someone, somewhere, and Claire doesn’t question it. She’s all out of big questions and focuses on the less philosophical ones instead.

“How do we get them back?” she asks.

“Don’t worry about that. They’ll get themselves back.”

They get nothing more from Christian, and things start speeding up again.

The Dharma village has long been abandoned, that much is clear. It seems that no-one has lived in it since the mercenaries came and destroyed it and Claire had her umpteenth brush with death. She shivers as she surveys the wreckage around her. Frank, for his part, is just confused but seems ready to go along with anything that the island throws at him. He’s been here before and survived, after all, so there’s no reason why he can’t do so again. Locke’s dead, then alive, then dead again, and then it comes apparent that the thing that wore her father’s face is now wearing Locke’s as well, picking and choosing to suit his mood.

In the midst of all the murder and the mayhem and the Others and the Ajira passengers who are not at all what they seem, Sun and Claire and Frank stick together, wanting no part in any of it. All they want is to find their people and get off this godforsaken island as quickly as they can. They have to wait for the time travellers to come back from the seventies and there’s nothing that they can do to help with that, so they just settle down to wait, returning to their old beach camp.

Seeing it so deserted and run down brings a lump to Claire’s throat. Like it or not, this had been her home for several months, and she has a lot of memories from the place. The remains of her and Charlie’s old shelter are tattered and flapping in the breeze, and Aaron’s crib is upturned beside them. She finds herself going over and righting it, although there is absolutely no need for it now even if Aaron was on the island with her. Nevertheless, it’s still the first thing that she tries to mend.

Sun comes over and places a hand over Claire’s, and they share a moment of silence to think about the babies they have left behind in the outside world to come on this fateful trip.

Something metallic catches Claire’s eye, tucked in the cushions and blankets in the bottom of the crib, and she digs it out.

It’s Charlie’s DriveShaft ring. Number three on his list of greatest hits. He must have left it in Aaron’s crib before he went out to the Looking Glass.

A ring that was passed down father to son for generations, and Charlie had left it for Aaron.

Claire clasps both her hands around it tightly, bringing them up to her face and closing her eyes. Even now, years later, Charlie is still giving her courage and hope. No matter what happens now, she is getting off this island and she is getting home to Aaron. She owes it to Charlie if nothing else.


End file.
